Friday, May 3, 2019
ECHOES OF ANTIQUITY , FRESHNESS OF YOUTH      It's a storming performance. Young Isabella Nefar as Judith erupts upon us:  adolescent, exuberant, afire…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:10AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 2, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF,  POLITICAL ANGUISH       Handy timing ,  to open on what is  local Election Day for us ruralists and at a time when everything has a Brexity ec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 30, 2019
DEADLY DEBTS    The artistic love affair between August Strindberg's ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:00PM[SHARE]ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG       This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form.  Anyone with a a family " past, present, re…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32AM[SHARE]Saturday, April 27, 2019
A CLEANSING FURY FROM THE 1880s     Wipes you out every time, Ibsen's furious, shocking, violent assault on the cruel decayed conventions of his century's end. …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 25, 2019
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN…      It's a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiabil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:44AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 23, 2019
GUILT, GRIEFÂ AND PITY Â Â It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:28PM[SHARE]Monday, April 22, 2019
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website's unfunded free existence "  but here it is  for theatrecat regulars..)      The minu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 17, 2019
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Â Â Â Â Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) Â I heard a …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:56AM[SHARE]Sunday, April 14, 2019
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK…     I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer.  In three days there were 40 , each perform…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 11, 2019
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Â Â Â Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student perf…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:46AM[SHARE]BEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK    The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I'd say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 10, 2019
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE     Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin' it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole  "There i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PM[SHARE]Friday, April 5, 2019
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Â Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:23AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 3, 2019
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS     You can't fault the atmosphere:  Jasmine Swan's set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Bre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:26AM[SHARE]Saturday, March 30, 2019
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER    I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, prote…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:53AM[SHARE]A COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930'S   From the late 1930's for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were amo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:50AM[SHARE]Friday, March 29, 2019
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY,   QUESTIONING     If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too.  Not all the same identi-monster.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:05AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 28, 2019
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW…  From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel.Â…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:45PM[SHARE]Monday, March 25, 2019
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD  What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has "saved his life" becaus…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:50PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 24, 2019
I'M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW… Â So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:01PM[SHARE]Friday, March 22, 2019
NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK…     Exuberantly funny, elegant as a Deauville hotel balcony and sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover's head, Joanna C…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:39AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 21, 2019
POISONED LOVE  I sometimes wish Harold Pinter had written more plays like this: decadent, agonized, helplessly sensitive to the nuances of friendship and treachery. More prai…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 20, 2019
 MARTYRS OF THE MCCARTHY YEARS      Ideological hostilities across the world,  fake news and paranoia, a resurgent deep left, uneasy relations with Russia, anti…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:58AM[SHARE]Couldn't miss Nicholas Hytner's bit of mischief: after his years of being being alternately feted and rubbished in print, he displays directorial glee in sending up the noisome denizens of a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 27, 2018
NOT YET DEAD CAT BUT…  Since I stopped being The Times Chief Theatre Critic  it has been five years:  on this site there have been  930 posts, over half a million words…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:22PM[SHARE]Friday, December 21, 2018
A HOLLOW CROWN IN MUD AND BLOOD The clue is in the paper hat, worn by a dour-faced Simon Russell Beale on the programme cover.  This is not stately, sacred, shockingly regicid…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:32AM[SHARE]JAMAICA BREEZES UP WEST, WITH GRIEF AND GUSTO Â Â Â Â Jamaican mourning tradition, longer than the Irish wake and noisier than the Jewish shiva, involves –Â we lea…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:43AM[SHARE]Friday, December 14, 2018
PSYCHOPATHIC LIBERAL MEETS DINOSAUR PARENTS    Can we, I wonder, ever learn to deplore past attitudes without being vengeful about it? Hot on the heels of Mike Bartlett's…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:22AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 13, 2018
ONE MORE TIME, WITH FEELING . Â After two other full cast renderings in a fortnight -David Edgar's socially angry take at the RSC and Jack Thorne's warm spectacular at the O…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:46PM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 12, 2018
A GOTHIC EYEFUL In this troublous nation, 2018 seems to be the Christmas of Aaargh! and Eughhh! and hahahahaaa! , as a gross-out gigglefest sweeps London theatre. There's …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:40PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
